Reconstructing the Farm, Keeping an Eye on the Environment (with Robots)

Robotic Sensor Networks composed of robots and wireless sensing devices hold the potential to revolutionize environmental and agricultural sciences by enabling data collection across expansive environments, over long, sustained periods of time. In this talk, I will present our efforts toward this vision for two specific applications. In the first one, autonomous surface vehicles are charged with finding and tracking radio-tagged invasive fish. In the second application, ground and aerial vehicles collect data to assist precision agriculture. I will give an overview of the systems, application-specific challenges and our proposed solutions. The talk is intended for general audiences.

Volkan Isler is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Minnesota. He is currently a fellow of the UMN Informatics Institute. Previously, he was a 2009-2012 resident fellow at the Institute on Environment and 2010-2012 McKnight Land-Grant Professor. In 2008, he received the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award (CAREER). He chaired IEEE Society of Robotics and Automation's Technical Committee on Networked Robots and served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. His research interests are primarily in robotics, sensor networks and geometric algorithms.